Tag Archives: freelance_friday

Lately I’ve been thinking about quality. Or rather, quality as it sits in relation to speed, production realities, and reader perception.
I’m thinking about it now in particular for a few reasons.

Firstly, I’m currently working on the early issues of my first indie monthly comic, with all the attendant scheduling and process adjustments, and financial concerns, that entails.

Secondly, while in this frame of mind, I’ve been reading a few indie monthlies that have been huge successes. Titles that are amazing, popular, and which I have great respect for, so I hope this doesn’t read as sour grapes or anything. But as I’ve been reading, I’ve found myself caught up frequently on art niggles. Small things, but things I can’t help but notice – backgrounds or limbs that look sloppy rather than sketchy, copy-pasted panels where it’s clearly for time rather than a humorous or uncanny repetitive effect. So on and so forth. Part of me feels it’s snotty of me to let them bother me. But they do take me out of the story, and more importantly they relate to all the things about quality and schedules and readers that I’m thinking about right now. Because these are huge hits. Readers are obviously not as bothered by these things as I am. And given that, do they matter?

As we approach EU-VAT-Reg-Day (Jan 1), here are some updates. A lot has happened since my first VATMOSS post (which you can read here if you need a bit of background on what this is about. If you sell digital content online, this concerns you).

I will be getting things off Gumroad, etc, before New Years, and know what a lot of fantastic individual creators, small presses, and small businesses of different sorts will be calling curtain, and that is a horrible, backwards thing.

I’d been hoping to do a more in-depth followup of VATMOSS updates, but time has not allowed (if you’re not sure what VATMOSS is, see my last post, w/ info and links – if you sell digital content online – comics, fonts, knitting patterns, etc – and are in the UK/EU, this affects you).

Building on the petitioning and contact with HMRC in the UK, the aim of this is to push the European Commission to suspend the new regulations, before they break up over Christmas and the regulations roll in Jan 1.

Okay! So big, important post today, targeted at UK freelancers who sell digital products, about new VAT regulations thatapply to you (and other EU freelancers: this discussion regards EU-wide legislation, so any changes or thresholds are agreed in Brussels will, as far as I can tell, affect you too – you may wish to skip to Updates/What to Do Section). There’s already been a lot of incredibly valuable information, thoughts and action posted around HMRC’s new VAT changes, but I thought I’d try and collect as much good info as I could in one place, in case it’s helpful.

*Disclaimer – as always, I remind you that I am not a lawyer, and nothing I say should be considered legal advice. I’ll leave that to your lawyer and HMRC.

This is all to the best of my understanding – if you spot any errors or old information in here, please do let me know!

This’ll be quite a long post, with a bit on what VATMOSS is, what our options are, selling through third parties, Kickstarter/Patreon and donations, updates/things to do, and useful links.

Recently I was at a coffee shop, where I ordered a coffee and a piece of delicious-looking cake, which I gazed longingly at when it was brought to the table, grabbed a forkful, and….it was awful. So, unusually for me, I plucked up the nerve to take it back to the counter, and they traded it for me, while I mentioned how sorry I was for the bother probably 20 times, and then struggled to enjoy the much-nicer replacement cake and my coffee because I was so embarrassed. And it reminded me that I’d been wanting to write this!

Hey everyone! Gosh it’s been ages. Largely because I tend to want FF posts to be lovely things, illustrated and with time taken over them…but when time’s not there, I think I’d rather post what I can instead of leaving this series so untended! So I’ll try and do more miniposts 🙂 So, onwards!

Over the last couple of months, I’ve had a period of serious over-working.

I’m generally a big proponent of balance. I don’t think the way our work culture glamourises over-work, makes it into a virtue, is at all healthy. And I’m hoping to take some time off drawing-work at the end of this year to spend some time on business planning and examining my working and scheduling methods to help avoid it more in future. But, even then – and I may be wrong in this – I kind of think there’ll probably always be those times, now and then. Those times where you have to take extra work. Those times when you need the extra income. Those times when you get screwed over by clients’ schedules. Those times aren’t sustainable, and aren’t something to take as the norm. But those times happen…

-I was also happy to be featured on Comics Alliance‘s great Hire This Woman series! This is less freelance-focussed, but is about how I work and the kind of work I like to do, so hopefully also of interest! 🙂 Give it a read here!

-And this one’s not freelance-y at all, but the brilliant Comics and Cola had me on their Comics Shelfies series, and I know I’m not the only one who likes to gaze at bookshelves! You can check mine out here 🙂

-And finally, while not from the last week, there’s this recent interview on the Comics Beat, with some really thoughtful, in-depth questions that cover some freelance-relevent topics like balancing workloads, personal projects and growth, etc. Check it out here!

You may have noticed the lack of posts both this week and last. Given current busy-ness (and breaks – a couple of days off is reasons on for today’s lack protest, so perhaps we should call this a post on the necessity of time off! ^_~ ), I’m going to re-label this a not-quite-weekly series for now. Keep checking back, I’ll try and still keep it fairly regular, and hopefully we can kick back into full gear in the new year! 🙂

Today I’ve just been tidying up my template collaboration agreement to send over to someone, and though others might find it useful, so today will be a document post.

This is for cases where work is not being commissioned – rather I’m developing a creator-owned project with a colleague. Even when working with friends, it’s a) just good practice to always have an agreement, and b) discussing it makes sure you’re both on the same page about what the project is, what you’ll be doing with it, and various ‘what-if’s, right off the bat.

Disclaimer: As always, this is based purely on personal experiences and approaches, and should not be considered as business advice, legal or otherwise. Any use you make of posts on this blog are entirely at your own risk.

My document pasted in after the cut. Please feel free to add anything that’s missing in the comments, so we can all pool our resources!